The Secret to Creating Success

Anyone will tell you that if you want to change your life you have to change what you are doing. If you continue doing the same thing, you will get the same results, but what type of change is needed for the success you strive for and how can you initiate it?

Success is different for everyone. It may be related to a measure of our financial security (wealth), but it may also be reflective of the value you provide to other people, your public profile, the connection you desire to have with your family or a plethora of other measures.  Whatever your definition of success is, you can start attracting more of it by following a few simple steps.

Frequently opportunities are taken up that appear amidst the busyness of life. Many find themselves doing a job they are good at, but not necessarily enjoy or find easy to do. This reflects they have adapted to the environment and are able to do it successfully enough to survive, but it’s not an ideal environment to prosper. Chances are however, there is little fulfillment and no passion for what they are doing.

Every person is unique so it makes sense that no one person can do exactly what you do.  You have been planted with a seed of purpose; it is just that most people go through life never reflecting enough on themselves to become aware of their path in life.

{quotes}When you are living a passionate life, nothing seems like work{/quotes}, and you are able to ride the wave of success with seemingly little effort. This is often referred to as the ‘in-flow’ or ‘in the zone’ state. When things are going well it is like being swept along in a river current. Time rushing by, but the ride is fun.  The ‘out of flow’ state is when you find yourself trying to fight the current and swim upstream and getting no where.

To find your flow starts with recognising that each person has been given some natural talents and strengths that allow them to do certain things that they find easier to do than most other people. In fact, they often do not value these gifts as they find it so easy. 

Make a list

To help you identify what you should be doing start by listing all the things that you are good at, find easy to do and enjoy doing such as reading, training, meeting people, coaching, meditating, public speaking, talking, to name a few! This is likely to start making you aware of your natural gifts.

Seek the opinions of your family, friends and colleagues about what they perceive you to be good at.  Then make a list of all the things you enjoy doing. This will start indicating where your passions are, and what motivates you to spring out of bed. 

The last list is about all your uniqueness, which is the special things that you offer or makes you different from everyone else. These could include being multi-lingual, your qualifications, international work experience….

With these three lists you can start seeing where things relate by connecting lines between them. You may find that some of your likes and passions are related, such as linking training with project management, and your uniqueness shows you have qualifications in that area. This example may indicate that you would be great at delivering project management education and this may link you to a new career.

You would now be more aware of the ‘value’ you offer. However your self-esteem may be your biggest hurdle to any limiting beliefs or other mental barriers that may well be sabotaging your success. 

When a person is passionate about what they do and it aligns to their natural talents, values and uniqueness, they are in a very confident state.  Confidence sends a strong message to your customers, family and friends. This means that there is a high correlation between success and your self-esteem

If you do not have high self-esteem then you are more likely to remain in your comfort zone, and not take up the opportunities that are presented to you, nor will you step up to take the actions required to become successful.  In this frame of mind, we usually are not acceptable to critical feedback and may take to heart what people may say that we interpret as negative. A successful person welcomes all feedback as it may point out their own blind shots to previously unknown issue areas, and be used as an opportunity to make adjustments and improve.

You can do it

So what can be done about your self-esteem? Firstly, you need to understand that the level of success you enjoy today actually starts with your thinking.  You are the cause of the situation you are in, so taking responsibility is an important step. All your results are based on the behaviours and actions you have taken, however they are driven by your thoughts, value and belief systems.   Whatever you are thinking about or focused on is what is impacting your success rate.  This includes what you are saying to yourself like, ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I cannot do this’ and ‘I am not ready to do this.’

These doubts and fears are eating away at your self-esteem.  They sit deep in the subconscious, and act like a musical record you keep playing to yourself.  You can get rid of these barriers through coaching techniques like neuro linguistic programming (NLP), emotional freedom technologies (EFT), hypnosis and time line therapy.  You can also do some things yourself if you cannot afford to visit a therapist or mind coach.

By realising you are the cause for your current state, you become aware that you are the actual record player, which means you can change the record at anytime. Once you understand that the bad experiences and memories you may be recalling and playing in your head are simply stored pictures, sounds or feelings, then you can start to appreciate the simplicity of your challenges. So when a person is recalling a disturbing event in their head, they are simply seeing, hearing or feeling or a combination of them all that leads them into a negative state.

Our mental state can be changed by changing the record. We know the brain works this way by our instant emotional reactions to daily events. You can be feeling wonderful in one moment and then witness something awful and instantaneously changes your mental state into a negative one. It relates to the meaning you give to the experience or its association to other memories you have from the past.  This is why one person can see a smiling baby and become in a state of joy, whereas as another may connect the baby to a memory of a lost child (play a record) and enter a state of misery.

So if we can change our results through our behaviours, and our behaviours are based on our thinking, how can we make these changes to our thinking? The answer lies in understanding motivation and goal setting.  There are two main types of motivation, ‘away’ from motivation and ‘toward’ motivation.

‘Away from’ motivation is about avoiding pain. As a short term strategy it can be effective as it may act as a protective mechanism to help remove us from bad environments, such as when we are trapped in a negative scenario and then become motivated to leave it.  It may help us leave a bad relationship or job, so it has some benefits.  The danger is that this motivation style focuses on what we do not want. If we over use it or focus on the negatives too long, we become focused on what we wanted to avoid, transfixed on the negative, and that is exactly what we will attract.  This is the type of thinking we want to eliminate in our lives.

The better solution for success is to use ‘toward’ motivation, as it is focuses on moving towards a specific goal and is based on gaining some benefit. This is the most powerful tool in moving towards success; however it does need the individual to know what they want. This means that unless you have goals in your life, you are not able to utilise your greatest power. Your subconscious mind is your best fulltime 24 hours a day employee, if you choose to use it, but it does need instructions from the conscious mind about what you want.

Believe it

Dependent on the motivational style you use, the ‘Law of Attraction’ applies based on what you are focusing on or interested in. So what are the steps for leveraging this ‘Law?’ Simply, you need to know what you want and to think positively and continually about it.

If you started taking an interest in boats, your filtering system will be influenced to allow anything associated with boats through to your conscious awareness.

When in a crowd, your ears will pick up on conversations about boats, and you will most likely be speaking about the topic every chance you get, thereby tapping into other’s knowledge and experiences of boats. You start becoming aware of all the opportunities about boats because you are initiating or joining in on related conversations. You have effectively wired your brain to respond to boats. When you decide on what boat you want and you have an expectation to get it, then the mind starts looking for both opportunities and ways to make it a reality.

This means that for us to succeed we need to know what success is, and the end goals we desire so that we can start using our brain more efficiently in ‘toward’ motivation mode.  A full goal process is available at my website www.peoplerich.com which explains how to formulate winning goals. For goals to be accepted by the subconscious mind they need to be specific and measurable, be time constrained, be aligned to our personal values (ecological), be realistic and be something we expect to achieve.

Once we have clear goals, you can actually create your own self-motivating records to play through visualisations as in imagining events and affirmations (continually repeating positive words we affirm to ourselves). Research has shown that these practices, undertaken with strong emotion, have similar physiological impacts on the neural networks in the brain as a real life experience. If you repeat them, they become reality in our own minds and start to drive your thinking. It is empowering to know that you actually have control over the physiological wiring of your brain, and you choose whether to feel good or bad. 

So why is it so important to know what we want? Well apart from the ability to utilise ‘toward’ motivation, the subconscious mind follows the focus of the conscious mind. This explains why when we focus on negatives we start becoming more aware of negatives, and therefore we start drawing more negative things into our lives. This is the basis of the ‘Law of Attraction.’

Hungarian biologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, suggests that your five senses – eyes, ears, skin, nose, and tongue – are being bombarded by approximately 2,000,000 bits of information per second; however your nervous system’s filters decrease this to a manageable size of about 134 bits per second to process the information. This means that the actual amount of information you process is approximately 0.000067 percent of what you receive through your senses. 

So what drives this filtering process? It comes back again to your conscious instructions about what you are interested or focused on. For example, if you recall the time you bought your current car; you may remember how many of that same car you noticed on the road, but you are unlikely to have consciously become aware of the car in front or behind it. Those other cars were filtered out as unimportant.  This is because you have given a direct instruction to your subconscious of what interests you, and therefore it remains part of the 134 bits of information a second that you effectively let through. 

Be wired

You can wire your brain to attract opportunities. Billionaire real estate expert Donald Trump has wired himself to notice everything related to real estate. His filtering systems are focused on for-sale signs, for-lease signs, empty car parks, removalist trucks, empty shop windows, and other similar indicators that relate to real estate opportunities. Some people will say he was just lucky, that he was in the right place at the right time. In reality, he wired his mind to align to all opportunities related to real estate, and therefore he attracted those opportunities.

Luck is simply when preparation meets opportunity. Equally, if you are focusing on negatives, such as your poor financial position, the focus on poverty will filter out opportunities to notice opportunities for wealth, and you start noticing everything relating to being poor. This will make you reaffirm your negative reality and you end up filtering out all the opportunities that could turn your financial position around.

{mosimage} So what is the magical formula? Simply utilise your natural talents, be passionate about what you are doing, be clear on what you want to achieve, and serve as many people as you can. When we serve, we sow into the lives of others, and when we think about serving as many people as possible, we start thinking about new and innovative ways to get our product, service, or value out there. This follows the concept of leverage.

By being true to yourself and leveraging your natural talents and living life with passion, success is sure to follow. Maintain a focus on your goals and a more positive mental state, wiring your brain for success, and bringing more joy into your life. Just remember – the record you play with the highest volume always wins.